Surf wrote on Feb 27, 2010, 15:02:How many people bought this game? Like 5? I thought it sucked ass only because I had no control of the ships once the battle commenced. If he/they added that it would be cool.

That just means you missed the point. That's not what kind of game it is.

Still, I passed on the DLC for this. The base game gave me some fun times, but I wasn't able to see the differences that would come out of a few new weapons and classes of ships. There are already a ridiculous number of options in the game.

For anyone who's played this and its addons, how is the balance? Does it change? Can you effectively overcome an opponents scenario that uses the DLC additions, with only the base ships and items? I'd love to know how far the designers went in keeping up the extremely refined design, if at all.

Yeah, I think the visuals are nice, just "off", like so many other aspects of this game.

No matter what the framerate is choppy. Fortunately on all the machines I've played it on it's not nearly as choppy as Icewinds youtube post. Even when I run it on a machine with a 4870X2 and 16GB of ram, it never felt as though it made it over 10fps.

In the end though this game is killing me to play the full version. It feels almost like this bizarre European take on a final fantasy game. Such a bizarre hybrid and nothing like what I was expecting from this studio. I haven't paid much attention to the news regarding this project, but I was really under the impression that they were supposed to go back to the Divinity 1 style of game. I can't imagine something still qualifying as an RPG and being anything further from Divinity 1 than this game is... Heh.

Anyway, what I really want for this is more flexible AI, maybe even the ability to script AI yourself. That would really set this game apart for me. It was pretty easy to overcome all the scenarios in the initial offering, you just build your ships, attack, if you lose you say "oh, guess I need X-weapon/shield instead", put it on there and retry. Not enough of actual problem solving. The initial AI offerings were beginning to be interesting, but I really want to do more than control the range of engagement and universal behavior. I'd love to set more complex instructions like switching behavior mid-fight. Like 50% armor remaining = retreat to nearest Protector-AI ship, or ships that flank only, but within certain parameters. I don't know, but yeah, direct control...? Go play your starcraft kid, this is an admirals game.

The isn't bad. Everyone on the CD team knows it as well. Purportedly, they sold over 1.5 million copies, and only missed their projected sales by 10%! Ten-fucking-percent, and they lay off half the team.

Don't buy shit from these companies. Let them fucking sink. Studios that go along with this crap don't' deserve your money, and the employees they axe deserve to work for better companies anyhow.

Oh man, if you ONLY knew. I can think of... maybe 3 studios in the US that aren't completely fucked in terms of management. That is not an exaggeration.

The layoffs are a product of upper management/publishing siphoning up as much revenue they can get. I may work in this industry, but I also can't wait to see it implode upon itself. May everyone of those responsible for such greed die a fiery death.

I never had many problems with Gothic 1 or 2. 3 was the real bug-fest.

Then again it's one of my favorite series, and I could just be mis-remembering 1&2 due to the bugs in 3 overshadowing it's predecessors.

Still, great games, but bad development. Wish Piranha kept the rights though. No studio should ever be stripped of it's original property or ideas. If anything the publisher should drop them, hire another dev, and get to work competing with them.